


Your Head Above Water

by tomato_greens



Series: Listen, Listen - music ficlets [21]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Discussion of Anxiety, Discussion of Panic, Gen, M/M, Mention of Past Abuse, Mindfulness Meditation, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-27
Updated: 2012-10-27
Packaged: 2017-11-17 04:24:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/547579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomato_greens/pseuds/tomato_greens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles starts meditating because Ms. Morrell e-mails him a link to a YouTube video.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Your Head Above Water

**Author's Note:**

> Please be safe, tender lumplings! Everything I've warned for is very abstract, but I want you all to be healthy and happy!
> 
> For [rlnerdgirl](http://rlnerdgirl.tumblr.com) on [tumblr](http://tomato-greens.tumblr.com/post/34439508322/fic-your-head-above-water)! Written to [Breathe](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCEzoOpG1zQ) by Alexi Murdoch.

Stiles starts meditating because Ms. Morrell e-mails him a link to a YouTube video. He’s forgotten all about it, is staring up at his ceiling and digging his fingernails into his own palms in a mindless, ragged rhythm, when his computer makes an irritated chirping noise and informs him he’s received a new message from Weirdo McFangface, which has been Scott’s entry in Stiles’s address book since the bite. (Before that it had been Pornstachio Numblips, because Scott didn’t always make the wisest choices regarding his facial hair, and before that, BFFL?, because the angry, sullen kernel hidden in the center of Stiles’s marshmallow heart is the 100% true fact that everybody leaves you eventually.)

Stiles is––not in the mood to be receiving anything from Scott, but if curiosity killed the cat Stiles has already been butchered a thousand times over, so he slithers off of his bed and into his desk chair, clicks idly on Scott’s typically subjectless headliner and reads, though not in so many words, _You’re great and all, but I miss Allison and also getting laid, and, by the way, in case you’ve forgotten, you’re not a big strong werewolf, just a puny human who could get hurt from my manly grip, so I think I’m gonna hang out with Isaac instead. But let’s see a movie sometime next week or something so you’ll still cling onto me with your pathetic and childish need and feed my ego. P.S. Remember how my dad doesn’t hit me anymore but your mom is still dead?_

Stiles knows he is exhausted and irrational, that even if Scott wanted to hurt him he wouldn’t do it like this. But he can’t help feeling the curdle of jealousy under his ribcage, the frustration and the fear he’s been stifling all year boiled into a vicious stew. He rolls his desk chair over the excruciatingly squeaky spot in the floor once, twice, three times, and is considering a fourth when he sees Ms. Morrell’s name again, the e-mail subject reading **I thought you might find this helpful**.

Stiles trusts Morrell about as far as she’d let herself be thrown, which by all accounts would not be very far at all, but he figures she’s not likely to send him anything permanently damaging by way of school e-mail, so he clicks it open. It’s just a link to a video and a smiley face, which seems uncharacteristic, but maybe when she isn’t busy subjecting her students to questionable Quebecois slang and mild psychological torture, Morell is actually a nice person who smiles and has friends and buys parsnips from the supermarket. Doubtful as that is.

The video turns out to be cheesy pictures of lakes and streams, accompanied by a woman’s gratingly wannabe-soothing voice. The nasal saw of it grinds against his hyped-up senses. It’s totally the opposite of relaxing or informative or anything that could possibly be useful. He can’t imagine what Morrell was thinking––this is obviously a bunch of New Age, pseudospiritual hojo mojo––but he clicks on one of the related videos out of self-directed schadenfreude, figuring he could use a laugh if nothing else.

But the music comes on and it’s just––smooth, calming, voices overlaid like the CDs his mom used to listen to during the Last Days, and Stiles finds himself leaving the video on and scooting back over to his bed almost without thinking about it. 

_Breathe in_ , says the video. _Focus on the location where air is entering into your body. Hold it––hold––now, out, feeling every particle of air as it escapes._

It is without argument the silliest thing Stiles has ever done, but he does it, suspended somewhere between the man’s deep, safe voice and the memories of his mom, thinner than a skeleton and frail, curled around him on one of her rare trips home, his father leaning in the doorway and coaxing his mom to sip a little broth despite her stomach. 

And then he

falls

asleep.

-

_Consider me a convert_ , he e-mails to Morrell the next morning. _Thanks._

-

It’s not a thing he talks about, it’s just something he starts doing: not every day, not even close, because turning off his inner cynic would be throwing down a shield in the heat of battle––stupid, imprudent, deadly––but when he hasn’t slept in sixty-odd hours and his breathing is shallow and damp, he’ll turn on the music and wait for the weird melancholia-tinged release it brings. His dad hasn’t mentioned it, but the mornings after he always squeezes Stiles’s shoulder a little harder, like they’re remembering his mom together.

He’s three-quarters of the way into a doze when the scrape of his window being lifted jerks him mostly into wakefulness. “What?” he mumbles, sitting up.

Derek looks at him, eyebrows furrowed. “I––I thought I––”

“You thought you what?” Stiles prompts, rubbing the corners of his eyes in a halfhearted attempt to dispel some of his sleepiness. This could be an emergency or something. “Derek, come on, man, I was just getting to sleep.”

“I thought I heard voices,” Derek says, looking confused. “But it’s just––” He gestures at the laptop.

“Yeah, it’s just,” Stiles says, irritated now. It’s going to take him at least another hour to struggle back where he started. “Have I mentioned how creepy you are lately? No? Well, this is Edward Cullen-level creepiness, dude, and I know you don’t––”

“I don’t sparkle,” says Derek, frowning.

Stiles clutches his chest in shock. “You know who Edward Cullen is!” he exclaims. “My life is flashing before my eyes!”

“I have seen a movie in the past five years, asshole,” Derek huffs.

Stiles manfully ignores the delightful implication that Derek Hale has seen Twilight, deciding discretion is the better part of valor, and also blackmail. “And yet I notice you didn’t refute any claims of creepiness,” Stiles says, wagging his finger. “So you know I’m right.”

Derek ignores him, surprise surprise, and wanders over to the laptop. “What is this?” he asks, poking at the screen.

“Hey, hey, hey, watch your grubby fingers,” Stiles warns, leaping up to protect his second-favorite baby, after the Jeep, from Derek’s unwashed and technologically inept hands. “What does it matter to you?”

Derek shrugs, looking intensely uncomfortable.

Stiles takes pity on him, sort of, and explains, “This is my private alone time meditation exercise that we never speak of again, okay?”

“I’m pretty sure this isn’t want most teenagers do with their alone time,” Derek says, and, while Stiles is recovering from the emotional whiplash that is Derek Hale attempting a joke, continues, “Laura used to do this. Or. Something like it.”

“Yeah?” Stiles breathes, not sure where this is going, or what Derek expects from him. When Derek doesn’t say anything else, Stiles admits, “Well, if you’re feeling out of control, it’s a good way to get back in the––in the driver’s seat.”

Derek nods. “Probably that was it,” he agrees. “New Alphas aren’t––well, you know.”

Stiles doesn’t know, not really, but then of course he does, doesn’t he, because Derek is out of control and has been since day one.

“You wanna try it?” he asks, gently, downy-soft and gentler than he usually knows how to be.

Derek shrugs again. “Does it help?”

“I think so,” says Stiles. “I mean, it helps me.”

“Sure,” Derek says, and it takes Stiles a second to realize he’s agreeing to try it. The silence between them bubbles and then pops as the lady in the video says, _This is life, always changing, always repeating itself._ Stiles pauses the video, clicks it back to the start. The chanting music starts again, washing over the dimmed bedroom, the unmade bed, the ugly posters Stiles’s mother hung up for him as joke but which he can’t bear to part with now. 

“Come on, then,” Stiles says, and leads Derek over to the bed. “Get in, you squeamish weirdo, there’s enough room for both of us. Come on. Breathe.”

-

_You’re welcome_ , Morrell writes back. _I’d hoped you would find some use for it._


End file.
